How & Why You Should Teach Every Marketer To Write For The Brand

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from our book This Won’t Scale. You can get your own copy of This Won’t Scale here.

George writes most of our emails, but he’s not the only writer on the team.

The way we write is an important part of our brand. That’s why every member of the marketing team is expected to write great copy.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an event marketer, a product marketer or a video producer — writing is everybody’s job.

You don’t need to be an English major and you don’t need to have perfect grammar. You just need to write like you talk.

And while that may sound simple, every new hire on the marketing team has to go through intensive training and scrutiny on writing.

We believe in the power of feedback. And when a new member is brought onto the team we give them consistent feedback to get them where they need to be writing for the brand.

In addition to learning from the other members of the team, we also spend a lot of time studying some of the greatest direct response copywriters, marketers and ad gurus of all time. We basically use them as our copywriting role models.

We do this for two reasons.

First, these guys could literally convince anyone to do anything. After all, they knew how to get people to open their mail, read the mail, write a check, send it back and get the postage. Now compare that to what we have to do: Try to get people to click a link.

Second, you need to study the things that don’t change.

Even though some of these books were written over a hundred years ago, the one thing that hasn’t changed since the beginning of time is people.

So while we live in this fast moving world of SaaS where the technology and the landscape are constantly changing, we don’t just obsess over funnel metrics or analytics. We obsess over people.

We need to understand our potential customers and buyers as people, not just some leads in our database. Like we said earlier, a sale doesn’t happen until a conversation happens.

And after reading something like 6 of these books, you’ll notice that these copywriters have one thing in common: They understand people. So we read these books to learn the timeless lessons of emotions, desires and human behavior.

And that’s our lesson. Forget the best practices. Forget what the SaaS bloggers are saying. Just go back and study these books:

Ogilvy On Advertising, David Ogilvy

Scientific Advertising, Claude C. Hopkins

Ca$hvertising, Drew Eric Whitman

The Ultimate Sales Letter, Dan S. Kennedy

The Copywriter’s Handbook, Robert Bly

Because if you understand what makes people move, you’re gonna become a better marketer.